=Chapter 1 - Echoes and Impact Craters=

Put that down, you don't know where it's been.

I braced myself against the back wall and braced for the inevitable explosion as my rocket raced towards the stable door.

What I wasn't expecting was an explosive decompression. Apparently the stable had seen fit to pressurize itself in the face of the pink smog.

Naturally, I was hurled out the meter sized hole in the door my rocket had made, landing straight into the middle of downtown Canterlot.

The first thing I noticed was that my lungs had suddenly been replaced by roughly lung-shaped blobs of lava that threatened to burn through my ribs.

Well, one mystery solved: this pink smog was definitely toxic to ponies. And the idiot in me completely neglected to get any healing potions from the infirmary. For one of the brightest minds of his time and a damn good mechanic, I’m bucking retarded.

Once I stopped coughing, or stopped enough to take a proper look around, I nearly collapsed.

Everything was exactly as it was two hundred years ago. The buildings, the roads, the shops, hell, even the long dead plants hadn’t been touched in two hundred years.Everything but the people, which I took this time to notice were also there, melted into the ground like pony shaped piles of pudding. That might be amusing if they weren't actually ponies.

More throwing up! Yay!

 Well fuck. That means this pink stuff melts ponies as well as circuitry. What a wonderful morning. That also throws a kink in my whole ‘the world got its shit blown to hell’ theory I had going. If the capital city of Equestria remained intact, the maybe the rest of the country was too!

Unless this pink smog was the megaspells the country was hit with. That meant that the zebras had developed magically augmented chemical weaponry, which could make this a hell of a lot worse than our ‘projections.’

Regardless, I had to get out of the city, and fast. I started making my way toward the city center, Canterlot Circle, and thus toward the road out of this nightmarish distortion of my former home.

On the way toward the Circle, I decided to make one detour to my apartment, which was only a quick jog away. After all, I needed to pick up what little ammunition I owned for my oversized sidearm.

I moved as quickly as I could down the streets of Canterlot, trying to ignore the corpses of ponies all around me, melted into the ground. There was an eerie silence that filled the air, and there was no breeze at all in the usually pleasantly windy city. I genuinely felt like I was in a museum, trapped inside a giant display case; nothing moved, nothing breathed. More than once I turned around, Pheonix drawn at the sound of my own hoofsteps echoing off the stone faces of the buildings surrounding me.

However, I could not stop myself from taking in the magnificent view of the Princesses' castle. It seemed to rise above the cloud, disallowing it to defile the regal Pony Sisters' home. I did notice several large creatures circling several of the towers like buzzards, but I couldn't make out what they were from this distance.

Once I reached the apartment complex I lived at, I made the grim realization that the cloud had seeped into everything, including the buildings themselves, no matter how well they were sealed, thought they did decompress, just like the stable, albeit less explosively. Doing my absolute best to avoid the sight of ponies curled up in corners, frozen in their final moments. I could even make out the expressions of horror on several of their half melted faces. Ooh look, there goes my breakfast too!

My apartment was exactly as I had left it, though any form of cloth was now in tatters. I grabbed the two sealed healing potions I kept in the bathroom for emergencies, the .50 caliber ammo for the Pheonix, and the ring I was going to give to my fiance. I needed a reminder of better days after this nightmare. Running down the stairs and back onto the street, I downed a bottle of healing potion, and immediately felt better. Now having a much easier time to breathe, I sprinted down the street back towards Canterlot Circle, and out of this horrible place

I didn’t notice it until I was almost on top of it, due to the increasingly thick smog, but I almost ran into a figure standing dead center in the street I was traveling, and a rather tall figure at that. It wasn’t until I was a good ten feet from it that I noticed it wasn’t melted into the stone, but rather alive, if the pink cloud swirling in front of its nostrils from its breath was any indication. It was also an alicorn. The size of Princess Celestia and midnight blue, I assumed it was a much older Princess Luna.

Reflex took over, and I immediately bowed, but keeping one eye on the massive pony. Only, she didn’t move. She didn’t even look like she was aware of my presence; her eyes just staring blankly forward. I took this time to notice that it was in fact not Princess Luna, as her flank was completely blank. She also just seemed different. I couldn’t quite put my hoof on it, but she definitely was not royalty. Whatever it was preoccupied with, however, abruptly ended, and she focused her eyes on me. What I saw were definitely not the eyes of Princess Luna; they weren’t even pony eyes. They were solid black when I first saw them, but the pupils had contracted, and those eyes were now filled with hatred. Something very smart inside me told me to haul ass, and haul ass I did.

Sprinting around the massive pony, the ground underneath me promptly turned to vaporized stone as lightning erupted from the horn of the alicorn. Running as fast as I could, I turned a corner to see the large fountain of Canterlot Circle, where the alicorn promptly teleported onto.

That was so not fair.

A large explosion overhead distracted us both, and we saw what looked like a sonic rainboom without the rainbow, and a meteorite hurtling towards us.

AAAAAAAAAAAAACCCE!

BOOM

The meteorite impacted directly on top of the alicorn, presumably killing whatever the hell it was.

As I approached the crater, I noticed the gore-spattered remains of the fountain the meteorite had crashed into scattered all around Canterlot Circle, ruining the otherwise pristine scene left by the horrid pink smog.

I did not, however, expect the meteorite to talk.

"Wanna go home. Wanna go home. Wanna go home." Its voice was vaguely metallic, and rather annoying. The meteorite was spherical in shape, and about two thirds of a meter in diameter, with a big, orange digital eye staring back at me intently.

I waved my hoof back and forth in front of the eye, watching its response. It at least seemed aware of my presence, and somewhat sentient. Intelligence was a different story though.

"Uh, hello? That was quite the fall you just had. Are you alright?" The sphere stared at me quizzically, and started babbling. About space.

“Let’s go to space. You want to go to space? I like space. Let’s go to space.” Scratch that. Very annoying.

Doing my absolute best to ignore the sphere, I picked it up and tried to locate its vocal processor; if it was anything like a sprite bot or any other magically powered robot, it had speech processor and vocalizer. My search however, was cut short by a fit of coughing, this time bringing up blood.

My curiosity and patience temporarily put on hold, I latched the sphere onto the left side of my battle saddle, the other side still holding the empty rocket launcher, and sprinted for the street out of the city. Upon reaching the gates, I noticed that they were open, half melted ponies surrounding it, as if still trying to escape the clutches of the pink.

With no further time in my schedule for emptying whatever meager contents my stomach still contained from two hundred years ago, I pushed past the bodies and onto the road out of the city.

---===--- ---===--- ---===---

The long walk down the mountainside was rather uneventful, though I did have the company of my newfound extraterrestrial acquaintance who wouldn’t shut the buck up about space, but that did little to pass the time.

“Atmosphere, b-black holes, Jupiter, the big dipper, th-THE BIG DIPPER!”

“What!? What is so important about the big dipper?”

“Big dipper? WE’RE GOING TO THE BIG DIPPER!? SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCE!”

Yeah, this thing was going to die by my hands.

“I’m the best at space. Space, space, oh! Oh! Oh! Let’s go to space.”

Sweet Celestia have mercy. Haven’t I had a rough enough day without having to commit mechanical murder? I had heard of the early Crusader computer core prototypes having personality malfunctions, but certainly nothing on this scale. This was specifically designed to make ponies want to kill themselves. But no matter how annoying this corrupted computer core was, it was extremely valuable, and I needed something to trade for food and shelter, provided anypony actually survived those horrible chemical attacks.

Once my primary needs had been met though, I needed to get to Stable-Tec headquarters in Fillydelphia. The mainframe in that facility undoubtedly had more information than Stable X-01 did, and I had to find out what had happened to everypony.

“I know what happened. They went to space. Everyone should go to space. Hey! Let’s go to space!”

This was going to be one long walk, but I thought I at least saw lights in the distance.

Level Up!

New Perk: Echoes of the Dead - You’re new experiences in Canterlot have hardened your spirit. Your endurance has been increased by 1.

A very special thanks to Kkat for writing the original. This is going to be fun to play around in.

P.S. - I still need an editor if you feel you’re up to the task of chewing up someone my work and crushing my hopes and dreams. PM or comment if you’re interested.